I've been playing Civ since the beginning. Civ II ToT or Civ II Gold are my favorite for sentimental reasons, but if I'm honest with myself, I feel it achieved near perfection in terms of interface and gameplay options in IV. With that said, I recently finally got Civ V and have played it for a little over a week now. This is the review for the game I just posted to newegg (it won't be up for a few days.) Note that I have not tried any of the expanded content or mods yet, so this is just my impression of the vanilla Civ V game:
Three out of five eggs.
"Great 4x strategy as always, but with some missteps."
PROS:
- Same great 4x strategy that Civ has always been known for, once you get used to the new interface and gameplay changes.
- Once again playable with just a mouse and nothing else if that's what you want to do.
- City States are an interesting addition.
- Beautiful aesthetic design.
- Hex grid, lack of unit stacking, and specialized ranged units allow for deeper strategy.
- Resources seem to be more finite and to matter more, which also adds greater strategic depth. They are also one of your only bargaining chips during diplomacy now, which makes them much more important than before.
- Civic policies allow for greater customization of civilizations' governance and nature.
- Tutorial eventually tells you just about everything you need to know, provided you're willing to read a bit.
- Some nice new diplomacy options, including a request for opponents not to build cities near your borders. (But see Cons and Further Thoughts for some caveats.)
- Some nice late game techs and units.
CONS:
- Somewhat less initially intuitive, more cluttered interface with more menus to dig through than Civ IV.
- Can't zoom all the way out to a large top-down view like you could in Civ IV.
- Sense of the Earth being curved is gone, in favor of bringing back the flat look of the earlier games.
- Simple, narrated tutorial is gone. In its place is a series of tool tips and advisor screens that you will see in the course of a normal game anyway provided you set the tool tips to "New to Civ." It's functional and tells you everything you need to know, but instead of narrating everything, you have to read quite a bit.
- Related to the previous point: TINY text when running on any high resolution, even just 1080p, and even on a large display. (This is adjustable via ini tweaks but an in-game option would have been greatly appreciated.)
- Religions are entirely gone, and with them a large component of Civ IV's cultural game. There is a "Peity" branch in the civil policies, but that's about it.
- Culture seems to play a substantially more limited role. It allows you to adopt civil policies at a faster and faster rate, but it has almost no tactical relevance beyond those policies' affect on your nation's economy, research, and production.
- You can still win in a variety of ways, but the path to those victories feel less distinct than in Civ IV.
- It's much harder to form alliances.
- There is NO technology trading. This is a big mistake in my opinion, as gifting techs was not only a way to supply alliances with an equal military footing during conflicts, but also a big component of the peaceful strategy, which is all but impossible now. Being benevolent toward a Civ that hates your guts (which sometimes happens from your first meeting no matter what you offer them) now means sacrificing extremely limited, and much needed, resources. (Note: You CAN enter into a shared research pact, which gives you both a technology at the cost of some gold, but it's not as practical as simply trading or gifting techs.)
- Countries will inevitably hate and wage war on you, and all you can offer them are monetary offerings. Which generally confer no benefit in their attitude toward you whatsoever. The aforementioned lack of technology trading hinders you further in this regard as well.
- Games tend to progress similarly from one to the next, so despite it still being Civ's greatest strength compared to many other games, it still feels lacking in replay value compared to previous entries in this particular series.
- Largely the same old tech tree we've had for three games now, with a fresh coat of paint and a few buildings added, rearranged, or replaced.
- City States, while a great idea and an interesting addition, ultimately just become more of a nuisance than anything else. You have to constantly keep them happy or the few benefits they confer are lost, and they frequently drag you into war with other Civs.
- No more vassal states. Countries no longer capitulate to become your vassals. Instead when capturing a city you can choose to annex it, raze it, or turn it into a puppet state. This means that you get the benefits like gold and resources from them, but you have no control over them. Coupled with the aforementioned inability to trade techs, this makes them far less useful or controllable than Civ IV's vassal states.
- No ability (that I've found) to adjust the gold/research/culture ratio as in previous games. I.e. if I'm in the red, I can't turn down gold production to make it a net gain. (On the plus side, this does make management of buildings more relevant. I'm torn on whether I prefer it this way or as it was.)
- Despite what I feel is greater strategic depth, poor AI makes for a less challenging game. Harder difficulties are punishing, to the point of seeming like cheating. But the actual AI is less daunting than it should be. Important cities and units are not effectively defended, and overwhelming an opponent with sheer numbers is a viable tactic. Cumulatively, the game feels a lot easier than Civ IV. Or even Civ Revolution for that matter in some respects.
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:
At the end of the day, this is a great strategy game. It's worthy of the Civ name and brings a lot of positive changes to the table. Strategically and tactically it's a deeper, more satisfying experience ultimately. You feel a lot more like a tactician, forward deploying front lines, withdrawing the first wave and carrying out follow on attacks, and keeping artillery and other ranged units in the rear. Fighting over resources is a real and necessary strategy now as well.
But its detracting issues still leave me wanting more. Especially how similar each game feels to the next. A cultural victory means filling up five of the civil policy trees, which means pumping out sufficient culture to adopt policies more frequently than your opponents. But that's something you'll be trying to do anyway if you have any interest in expanding your borders.
Military victory is straightforward, but if you're ahead technologically you're likely ahead in production and military units as well anyway so conflict eventually tends to become unavoidable, or just as feasible an option.
Diplomatic victory once again involves building the U.N. and voting but by the time you get there you will have already had a lot of battles and adopted a lot of policies as well. Since your options for fostering peace are extremely limited, you usually have no choice but to fight even if your goal is peaceful. The same goes for the space race, which is virtually unchanged. It seems a bit too easy to reach any and all of the victory goals, with little substantive gameplay difference between them in terms of what you'll experience while progressing toward them, no matter which nation you play as.
All in all, I'm at least fairly happy with the game. If you love Civ, you'll likely enjoy this, but the degree to which you will depends greatly on what you liked and didn't like about Civ IV. If you fell in love with any of the things about Civ IV that are gone from this game, you may end up feeling underwhelmed and disappointed.
Fortunately, the strategic depth and the good things it brings to the table - to say nothing of the DX II tessellation and fresh coat of paint it spruces things up with - are enough to make it worth it to me, since it's been a while since I've played Civ IV. I still have a good time with it despite its issues. But I'm hoping some of the available (or future) DLC, none of which I've tried yet or read up on, will address some of these issues. If not, I'll be disappointed despite enjoying the game overall.
Note to game designers: rules and limits are important and are what form the challenge we overcome within games. That's a given. But we should always feel free to exercise options within those rules, and Civ V made me feel less able to do that than Civ IV did. If the game was more challenging as a result, that would be a good thing. But that it does this while posing less of a challenge is not a good thing in my opinion. This seems like a good lesson to learn in terms of design philosophy.
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